Timeline Analog 3. John Buck

the first system, it was literally a folding catering table, with a bunch of decks and wires all over the place and an IBM 8088 computer with the light pen screen working a grid. I remember thinking - that it looked somewhat messy but I also thought this is very cool. I had seen literature in the trade press on Lucasfilm's EditDroid but that system wasn't something you saw in person.

       You had to be one of a handful of people working on it who saw the EditDroid and I certainly wasn't going to see it at Ruxton!I looked around a bit and said to Adrian, ‘what's with the light pen and the grid?’ and he smiled and replied ‘You editors all say different stuff about what you need in editing systems but everybody's got a script and a grease pencil’ and to be honest I didn't really know what he meant for years.

      Then as I learnt more about Adrian and his work, I realised he had obviously seen a Moviola years before and thought that's what I have to emulate, that's my metaphor.

      The Ruxto-Cue used Sony Betamax machines to feed camera rushes but Bill Hogan told Ettlinger of the JVC BR-6400U, a VHS video deck that he thought was better suited. Ettlinger recalls

       Bill at that time had been making use of the JVC machine. Once I studied it, it didn't take me long at all to realize that it would be a superior machine to use.

      The arrangement between Ettlinger and Hogan had provided sufficient room and manpower to create a proof of concept but without finance and a permanent base to work from, few would take the Ruxto-Cue seriously. Ettlinger turned to an old friend from his period of automating studio lighting at CBS.

      Milton (Milt) Foreman was the former CEO of ColorTran Industries and had won the technical Oscar in 1964 for his invention of versatile and compact quartz iodine lamps. Ettlinger recalls:

       Milt had come to the motion picture industry from a different route than most. He was originally a metallurgical engineer working for a steel company and over a number of years he established himself as a very good manager and after that he was then hired to head up the lighting company ColorTran. He was very much aware of what could be done with technology within the movie industry.

      Not only did Foreman understand technology he had many contacts around Hollywood. He had been a consultant for the Association of Motion Pictures and Television Producers, the Samuel Goldwyn Stages and the Kaufmann Astoria Studio in New York. Using some investment money they moved into apartment U224, at the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank where Ettlinger lived and worked. Andy Maltz recalls:

       We were still working on the system, while in the background Milt Foreman was trying to secure funding for the next stage. In fact, I'll never forget my first meeting with Milt at the Oakwood Apartments. I would go over to meet with Adrian, tweaking the system and this one time, Milt was sitting there on the sofa and he looks over at me and asks the others, ‘Who's this guy?’ It felt pretty intimidating at the time as Milt was an old-school guy and I was new, but over time and as the system evolved, Milt became a great business mentor to me.

      As Ettlinger and Maltz continued coding, Foreman worked on a deal with Jerry and Al Lapin of the American iHop restaurant chain to fund Ruxto-Cue.

      BARKER

      While engineers and scientists formed the initial teams to build the next generation editing systems, a new group rose to sell the systems to an often sceptical marketplace. A future editing 'evangelist' graduated from business school and moved into post-production. Bob Slutske became director of marketing at the Hollywood based post-production company, Compact Video.

      Compact had every piece of equipment you could imagine. It had a 16mm lab, offline and video editing for audio and video, satellites and videotape. It was a great place to learn about what clients wanted in videotape and in electronic editing.

      The recently unemployed Ron Barker decided to tour Compact Video and other West Coast facilities to see where the market was headed and what opportunities were present.

       I was unable to get access to Adrian Ettlinger’s system and then Clark Higgins organized a meeting for me with Coppola in his San Francisco office the following week, where I found Francis to be uninterested in the details but committed to using technology in film making. Clark then took me over to Lucasfilm, where he had worked but they weren’t saying a word about what they were doing.

       It was obvious to me after the fact finding mission, that the creative people wanted nothing to do with the strict regimes of linear editing defined by timecode and conversely, the engineers and online editors were primarily focused on developing the conventional 'linear systems'. It was then that I realized I was onto something. That I had something to contribute to editing.

      On his return east, Barker evolved his editing system concept further, using experiences from his wide and varied engineering career. However it was a different activity that provided the catalyst. The tactile nature of film editing reminded him of the intuitive control of the remote control model helicopters he had flown. Barker imagined a machine that was the polar opposite of a CMX linear system.

      It was to be a system that provided an editor with visual cues and yet was driven by highly specialised hand controls. After his ‘eureka’ moment Barker worked from a spare office at equipment maker Adams-Smith.

       They lent me a room next to their conference area for six weeks and my secretary Beverley and a few others who I had convinced to come across from BTX worked away. All I had in those days was a Betamax machine and some tiny televisions that I bought from the Sears department store.

       You see I chose those decks because the Betamax machines had a remarkable feature that VHS decks and most professional systems didn’t have, they had a still frame ability. I thought if you could use that still frame as a method of identifying a clip whether that was the in and out frames or a method of sorting clips. I wasn’t exactly sure.

      HESTER AND IVES

      Despite the growing advances in video hardware, most editing was still carried out in the analog domain on turn key systems. Jerry Hester had completed EECO's new timecode based editing system, the Intelligent Video Editing System (IVES).

      Having been built from scratch to exploit three microprocessors, the IVES (above) differed from many of its competitors because it was 'absolutely frame accurate' and used a new generation user interface.

       IVES integrated into the edit controller the timecode reader/generators and all of the common timecode functions that needed to be performed prior to editing. It had special "macro keys" which, after being hit three times, initiated processes like making a B roll copy of rushes on an available VTR, with or without the same timecode.

       I attempted to simplify all of the separate operations that drove people mad in edit bays when preparing tapes for an editing session using timecode. Operations like setting up the timecode generator and connecting everything correctly, selecting the channel to record timecode on, rewinding the tapes, placing the deck into record mode and starting the generator, etc.

       "Striping" blank tapes with black and timecode and adding timecode to source tapes were the two most common timecode functions performed prior to editing using timecode. With IVES, you could simply push one button and it would take over to rewind a blank tape, play it from the head, back-time the timecode generator and then go into record mode and begin striping it with black and timecode. While this was happening, you could then add a different timecode to a source tape.

       Other "Macro" timecode functions included adding timecode to a source tape while also making a copy with the same timecode and adding different timecodes to two tapes at the same time. No use wasting time. All of these timecode functions were possible because IVES contained two independent timecode reader/generators and built in A/V routing systems.

       But they were hidden away from the editor. After all, the people editing just